tips

IXL often has a bad rap amongst students. While it is easy for teachers to use and assign, misuse of the program and an overemphasis on drill will cause burnout for your kids. Whether you have been using IXL for years, or have yet to start, read below for three ways to get your class excited about using IXL. IXL in Centers/Stations As your students move through rotations in your math or literacy class, it is often challenging to have work that all students can do independently. Whether it is gaps in learning, struggling readers, or lacking background knowledge, there are many...

What I truly love about Apple and the iPad is their dedication to accessibility. (You can learn more, here). Below I present to you my top 5 iPad accessibility tips for the iPad! Tip #1: Enable dictation (it isn’t cheating) Dictation allows students to use the microphone to use their voice to type. This is POWERFUL for many students, and while it may feel a bit like cheating, I promise you that it isn’t. To turn on dictation, Settings > Keyboards > Enable dictation towards the bottom. Tip #2: Speak Screen and Speak Selection (this also isn’t cheating) Speak Selection...

Seesaw has just released some amazing improvements that will make your teacher life so much easier! Students can’t delete teacher-created activity pages anymore Smarter pen vs move tool selection Accidental page reordering and creation fixed No more accidental unlocking Be sure your app (and your students’ app) is updated to fully enjoy these five new changes. Keep reading to learn more! Prevented Page Deletion by Students Before: Students could delete pages from Activity templates.  After: When responding to an Activity, students cannot delete pages that are part of the Activity template created by teachers. Tapping on the 3 dots will only...

The majority of my students in my 4th grade classroom are able to use writing to explain their thinking and answer any given problem. They may need sentence starters or a bit of extra support, but they will be able to find success and mastery just by writing. However, there is always a student or two that need a little more than extra support, and would benefit from being able to respond to problems in different ways. Explaining answers aloud is a common IEP accommodation and strategy for our EL students, but can often be mentally draining to put into...

Classroom Screen has been around for a long time, and I thought it could be helpful in the classroom, but I never realized what a game changer it truly was.  I’ve now been using Classroom Screen for a week – that’s right, only a week – and I can already tell you that it makes a difference for my students.  I am a type B teacher.  Organization is not my strong suit and consistency doesn’t come naturally. Despite this, I know that is what students need in the classroom, so I try my hardest to find ways to be organized and...

In my classroom, I want all students to learn. Don’t we all? But I also want my nights and weekends to myself and not to be spent lesson planning. So how does one find the time to plan for all SIOP components within every lesson you teach and still work within contract hours? Well, the truth is… you don’t. At least not yet.  If you are just getting started on the journey to ensuring your lessons are accessible to all, let me be the first to welcome you to our quest. Below I broke down the SIOP components into two...

I’m a huge fan of cutting down on clicks in my work. If I can keep my hands on the keyboard, I can work more quickly and efficiently. Granted, this may all be just in my head, but here are some quick tips on using Chrome to boost your efficiency in day to day tasks. Set your startup pages In Chrome, you can specify what you want to happen when you open it for the first time. For example, I always want my calendar and Canvas to open up. They’re the first places I go and having them open by...

Looking for ways to change up how you use content and language objectives in your classroom? Below find 5 ideas on how to up your game with content and language objectives. Up Your Game Idea #1: Make it Routine Include a consistent presentation of your content and language objectives at the beginning of your class period. Consider including it with your bell work, including vocabulary that students will need to understand to be successful for the class period, or even reminding students of what they learned in the previous lesson. Want to use these templates as-is? Find them here on...

Practice and Application The 6th component of SIOP is Practice and Application. Practice and Application focuses on how will students will practice both the content and language objectives. It is the what and the how of the lesson. When we are thinking about Practice and Application, it’s important to keep three considerations in mind. Provide hands-on materials and/or manipulatives for students to practice using new content knowledge. Provide hands-on activities for students to apply content and language knowledge in the classroom. Use activities that integrate all language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) In this blog post, we will be focusing...

When looking for a new program to use with students, my first question is always “Can they log in with google?” instantly followed by “Can I just give kids a class code?”. The last thing I want to worry about is creating a class, inputting student information, creating usernames and passwords, managing those usernames, and the list goes on. Well, Clever is the solution to that problem. It not only gives students ONE website to log into, instead of needing to log into different websites all day, but will also automatically create classes, enroll students into those classes, and give...

New Analytics has a lot of new interesting features that let you track what your students have or have not been doing in a course. We’ve already written about messaging by overall course grade, but one of the newest additions in features is the ability to message students by activity in the course, not just by grade. You can use this to target students that overlooked a certain assignment or contact those not looking at important aspects of your course. You can open New Analytics from the left hand menu. To message students by activity, go to the Weekly Online...

Google Meet offers a way to call phone numbers from a meeting in progress for people who cannot join by video. This is also a way to make phone calls to families or parents without giving out our personal number. Once you have your Meet started, you can call a phone directly using the Add People option in the People menu. Change the settings to Call and then type in the phone number you want to call. The recipient will be placed right into the Meet room via their phone. When they hang up after the conversation, repeat for the...

There are a couple of different ways you can organize your classes in Seesaw. One is by utilizing the unique classes already created through your PowerSchool accounts like Math and Reading. The other way is to use folders inside of one class or you can use of combination of the two. Once inside a class, Seesaw allows you to create folders for student work and activities. This is helpful for grouping student tutorials, anchor charts, or larger topic based materials. Teacher and student work can also be sorted into leveled activities for students based on reading or math level, English...